The bride and bridegroom were not to start on their travels till after dark. They were going northward by the mail, on their way to Dover.
Very little had been said about the honeymoon. It was only vaguely understood that John Treverton and his wife were going to the South of France. The vicar had to hurry off soon after breakfast, to read the funeral service over the coffin of a venerable parishioner, and the rest of the company took their departure as a signal to disperse. There was nothing to detain them. This marriage was not as other marriages. There were to be no evening revels, there was no dazzling array of wedding gifts to .stare at and talk about. Laura had so few friends that her wedding presents could have been reckoned on the fingers of the little white hand that looked so strange and wonderful in her eyes, glorified with a brand new ring, a broad and solid band of gold, strong enough to wear till her golden wedding. The few guests felt that there was nothing more for them to do but to take their leave, with much reiteration of good wishes, and cheery anticipations of the festivities which were to enliven the old house, when the honeymoon should have waned.
And now all were gone; the brief winter day was closing, the new year was coming with hastening footsteps. Only the merest remnant of the old year remained. How silent the house was in the winter gloaming, silent with an almost death-like stillness. Laura and Celia had spun out their parting to the last moment, lingering together in the hall long after the rest had gone. Celia had so much to say, so many injunctions about cuffs and collars, and the times and seasons at which Laura was to wear her various gowns. And then there were little gushes of affection, hugs and squeezes.
‘You won’t care one iota for me now you’ve a husband,’ murmured Celia.
‘You know better, you silly girl. My marriage will not make the slightest difference in my feelings.’
‘Oh, but it always does,’ said Celia, with an experienced air. ‘ When a man marries the friends of his bachelor days go to the wall; everybody knows that; and it’s just the same thing with a girl. I expect to find myself nowhere.’
Laura declared she would always be true to friendship, and thus they parted, Celia running home by herself, with all her wedding finery smothered under a waterproof Ulster. The rain had ceased by this time, and there was the red gleam of a wintry sunset in the west.
The hall-door shut with a clang that echoed in the silence of the house, and Laura went slowly back to the drawing-room, wondering a little to find herself alone in the gloom of twilight on her wedding day. It was altogether so different from the ordinary idea of a wedding — this delayed departure, this uncomfortable interval between the festivity of the wedding breakfast and the excitement of the wedding journey.
She found the drawing-room empty. She had left John Treverton there with Mr. Sampson half an hour ago, when she went upstairs to assist in packing Celia in the waterproof, and now both were gone. The spacious room, splendid with an old-fashioned splendour, was lighted only by the fading wood fire. The white panelled walls and antique mirrors had a ghostly look; the shadowy corners were too awful to contemplate.
‘Perhaps I shall find him in the study,’ Laura said to herself. ‘It is kettledrum time.’
She laughed softly to herself. How new, how strange it would be to sit down tête à tête at the oval tea-table, man and wife, settled in domesticity for life, no further doubt of each other or of their fate possible to either — the bargain made, the bond sealed, the pledge given, that could be broken only by death.
She went slowly through the silence of the house to the room at the end of the corridor, the little book-room opening into the flower garden. She opened the door softly, meaning to steal in and surprise her husband in some pleasant reverie, but on the threshold she stopped appalled, struck dumb.
He was sitting in an attitude of deepest dejection, his forehead resting on his folded arms, his face hidden. Sobs, such as but seldom come from the agonised heart of a strong man, were tearing the heart of John Treverton. He had given himself up, body and soul, to the passion of an unconquerable despair.
Laura ran to him, bent over him, drew her arm gently round his neck.
‘Dearest, what is amiss?’ she asked, tenderly, with trembling lips. ‘Such grief, and on such a day as this! Something dreadful must have happened. Oh, tell me, love, tell me.’
‘I can tell you nothing,’ he answered, hoarsely, putting her arm away as he spoke.’ Leave me, Laura. If you pity me, leave me to fight my battle alone. It is the only kindness you can show me.’
‘Leave you, and in such grief as this! No, John, I have a right to share your sorrow. I will not go till you have confided in me. Trust me, love, trust me. Whom can you trust, if not your wife?’
‘You don’t know,’ he gasped, almost angrily. ‘There are griefs you cannot share — a depth of torture you can never fathom. God forbid that your pure young soul should ever descend into that black gulf. Laura, if you love, if you pity me — and indeed, dear love, I need all your pity — leave me now for a little while; leave me to finish my struggle alone. It is a struggle, Laura, the fiercest this weak soul of mine has ever passed through. Come back in an hour, dear, and then — you will know — I can explain — some part, at least, of this mystery. In an hour, in an hour,’ he repeated, with increasing agitation, pointing with a wavering hand to the door.
Laura stood for a moment or so, irresolute, deeply moved, her womanly dignity, her pride as a wife, hurt to the quick. Then, with a smile, half sad, half bitter, she softly quoted the gentle speech of Shakespeare’s gentlest heroine: —
‘Shall I deny you? No: Farewell, my lord.
Whate’er you be, I am obedient.’
And with those words she left him, full of painful wonder.
If she could have seen the agonized look he turned upon her as she left him; if she could have seen him start and shiver as the door closed upon her, and rise and rush to the door, and kneel down and press his lips upon the insensible panel her hand had touched, and beat his forehead against the dull wood in a paroxysm of despair, she might have better estimated the strength of his love and the bitterness of his grief.
She went to her own room, and sat wondering helplessly at this trouble and mystery that had come down like a sudden storm-cloud upon the brightness of her new life. What did it mean? Had all his professions of love been false? Had he bound himself to her for the sake of his cousin’s fortune, despite all his protestations to the contrary? Did he love someone else? Was there some older, dearer tie that made this bond of to-day intolerable to him? Whatever the cause of his repentance it was clear to Laura’s mind that her husband of a few hours bitterly repented his marriage. Never surely had such deep humiliation fallen upon a woman.
She sat in the firelit dressing-room, looking straight before her, numbed and helpless in her grief and humiliation. Reflection could throw no new light upon her husband’s conduct. What reason could he have for grief or regret, if he loved her? Never had fortune smiled more kindly upon man and wife than upon these two.
She looked back upon the days of their brief courtship, and remembered many things which favoured the idea that he had never really loved her, that he had been actuated by mercenary considerations alone. She remembered how cold a lover he had been, how seldom he had courted her confidence, how little he had told of his own life, how glad he had always seemed of Celia’s company, frivolous and even fatiguing as that young lady’s conversation was apt to be. It was all too clear. She had been duped and fooled by this man to whom she had so freely given her heart, from whom she had asked nothing but candour and plain dealing. She lived through that hour of waiting somehow. It was the longest hour she had ever known. Her maid came to attend to the fire, and light the candles on dressing table and mantel-piece, and lingered a little, pretending to be busied about the trunks and travelling bags, expecting her mistress to talk to her, and then departed softly, to go back to the revellers in the housekeeper’s room, where the atmosphere was heavily charged with tea an
d buttered toast, and to tell them how dull the bride looked, and how she had sat like a statue and said never a word.
‘Who was it went out at the front door just now?’ asked the old butler, looking up from a cup of tea which he had been gently fanning with his breath. ‘I heard it shut to.’
‘It must ‘ave bin Mr. Treverton,’ said Mary, Laura’s maid. ‘I met ‘im in the ‘all. I dessay he were goin’ out to smoke his cigar. It was too dark for me to see his face, but he didn’t walk as gay and light as a gentleman ought on his wedding day, to my mind,’ added Mary with authority.
“Well, I dunno,’ remarked Mr. Trimmer, the butler, solemnly. ‘Perhaps a wedding aint altogether the comfortablest day in a man’s life. There’s too many eyes upon him. He feels as he’s the objick of everybody’s notice, and if he’s a delicate minded man it kind of preys upon him. I can quite understand Mr. Treverton’s not feeling quite himself to-day. And then you see he come’s into the estate by a fluke, as you may say, and he ain’t got it yet, and he won’t feel himself independent till the year’s out, and the property is ‘anded over to him.’
Mr. Trimmer did not drop his aspirates habitually, like Mary; he only let one slip now and then when he was impressive.
The hour was ended. For the last twenty minutes Laura had been sitting with her watch in her hand. Now she rose with her heart beating tumultuously, and went quickly down the wide old staircase, hastening to hear her husband’s explanation of his extraordinary conduct. He had promised to explain.
Had she not been very foolish in torturing herself for this last hour with vain endeavours to fathom the mystery?
Had she not been still more foolish when she jumped at conclusions, and made up her mind that John Treverton did not love her? There might be twenty other reasons for his grief, she told herself, now that the hour of suspense was ended, and that she was going to hear his explanation.
She trembled as she drew near the door, and felt as if in another moment she might stumble and fall fainting on the threshold. She was approaching the most critical moment of her life, the very turning point of her destiny. All must depend upon what John Treverton had to say to her in the next few minutes. She opened the door and went in, breathless, incapable of speech. She felt that she could ask him no questions, she could only stand there and listen to all he had to tell.
The room was empty, Laura could just see as much as that in the fitful glow of the fire; and then a jet of flame leaped suddenly out of the dimness like a living thing, and showed her a letter lying on the table. He had written to her. That which he had to tell was too terrible for speech, and he had, therefore, written. Hope and comfort died within her at the sight of that letter. She hurried back to her dressing-room, where she had left the candles burning, locked herself in, and then, standing, faint and still trembling, by the mantel-piece, she tore open the envelope and read her husband’s letter,
‘DEAREST AND EVER DEAREST, —
‘When this letter is in your hands I shall have left you, in all probability for a long time, perhaps for ever. I love you as dearly, as fondly, as passionately as ever man loved woman, and the pain of leaving you is worse than the pain of death. Life is not so sweet to me as you are. This world holds no other delight for me but your sweet company, your heavenly love; yet I, the most miserable of men, must forego both.
‘Dearest, I have done a shameful and perhaps a foolish act. I have committed a crime in order to bind your life with mine, somehow, in the rash hope that some day that bond may be made legal and complete. Two ends are served by this act of mine. I have won you from all other men — John Treverton’s wife will have no suitor — and I have secured you the possession of your old home and your adopted father’s fortune. His desire is at least realized by this sad and broken wedding of ours.
‘Dearest love, I must leave you, because there is an old tie which forbids me as a man of honour to be more to you than I now am. Your husband in name; your defender and champion, if need were, before all the world; your adoring slave, in secret and in absence, to the day of my death. If Fate prove kind, this bond of which I speak will not last for ever. My fetters will fall off some day, and I shall return to you a free man. Oh, my love, pity and forgive me, keep a place in your heart for me always, and believe that in acting as I have acted I have been prompted by love alone. I shall not touch a sixpence of my cousin’s fortune till I can come back to you, a free man, and receive wealth and happiness from you. Till then you will be sole mistress of Hazlehurst Manor, and all that goes with it. Mr. Sampson will tell you what settlement I have made — a settlement that will be duly executed by me upon the day on which I become the ostensible owner of my cousin Jasper’s estate.
‘My beloved, I can say no more; I dare reveal no more. If you deign to think at all of one who has so deceived you, think of me pityingly as the most deeply wretched of men. Forgive me if you can; and I dare even to hope for pardon from the infinite goodness of your nature. It is sweet to me in my misery to know that you bear my name — that there is a link between us that can never be broken, even though Fate should be cruel enough to part us for life. But I hope for better things from destiny; I hope for, and look forward to a time when I shall sign myself, with pride and gladness more intense than the pain I feel to-day, your loving husband,
‘JOHN TREVERTON>.’
She stood for some minutes pale as marble, with the letter in her hand, and then she lifted the senseless paper to her lips, and kissed it passionately.
‘He loves me,’ she cried involuntarily. ‘Thank God for that. I can bear anything now I am sure of that.’
She believed implicitly in the letter. A woman with wider knowledge of the evil things of this world might have seen only a tissue of lies in these wild lines of John Treverton’s; but to Laura they meant truth and truth alone. He had acted very wickedly; but he loved her. He had done her almost the deepest wrong a man could do to a woman; but he loved her. He had duped and fooled her, made her ridiculous in the sight of her friends and acquaintance; but he loved her. That one virtue in him almost atoned for all his crimes.
‘There’s not the least use in my trying to hate him,’ she told herself, in piteous self-abasement, ‘for I love him with all my heart and soul. I suppose I am a mean-spirited young woman, a poor creature, for I cannot leave off loving him, though he has treated me very cruelly, and almost broken my heart.’
She locked the letter in the secret drawer of her dressing case, and then sat down on a low stool by the fire and wept very quietly over this new, strange sorrow.
‘Celia was right,’ she said to herself, by-and-bye, with a bitter smile. ‘It was an ill-omened marriage. She need not have taken so much trouble about my collars and cuffs.’
And then later she began to think of the difficulties, the absurdity of her position.
‘Wife and widow,’ she thought, ‘with a husband who ran away from me on my wedding day. How am I to account to the world for his conduct? What a foolish, miserable creature I shall appear.’
It came suddenly into her mind that she could not endure, not yet awhile, at any rate, to have to explain her husband’s conduct — to give some reason for his desertion of her. Anything would be better than that. She must run away somewhere. She must leave the revelation to time. It would be easier for her to write to her old friend the vicar from a distance.
She could bear anything rather than to be cross-examined by Celia, who had always distrusted John Treverton, and who might be secretly elated at his having proved himself an impostor.
‘I must go away at once,’ she decided; ‘this very night. I must go for my honeymoon alone.’
She rang, and Mary came quickly, flushed with tea, buttered toast, and the hilarity below stairs.
‘What time is the carriage to come for us, Mary?’ asked Mrs. Treverton.
‘At a quarter to eight ma’am. The mail goes at twenty minutes before nine.’
‘And it is just half-past six. Mary, do you think you
could get ready to go with me in an hour and a quarter?’
It had been arranged that Laura was to travel without a maid, much to the disappointment of Mary, who had an ardent desire to see foreign lands.
‘Lor, ma’am, I haven’t a thing packed; but I should dearly like to go. Do you really mean it?’
‘I do mean it, and I shall be very much pleased with you if you’ll contrive to pack your trunk in time to go with me.’
‘I’ll do it, ma’am,’ cried Mary, clasping her hands in ecstacy, and then she tore down-stairs like a mad thing to announce to the assembly in the housekeeper’s room that she was going to France with her mistress.
‘That’s a sudden change,’ said the butler. ‘And where’s Mr. Treverton all this time? He didn’t ought to be out of doors in the dark, smoking his cigar, instead of keeping his wife company.’
‘No more he didn’t,’ said Mary, with indignation, ‘he ain’t my notion of a ‘usband, leaving her to mope alone on her wedding day, poor dear. It’s my belief she’d been crying her eyes out just now, tho’ she was artful enough to keep her face turned away from me while she spoke. I dessay she’s made up her mind to take me abroad with her for company, because she feels she’ll be dull and lonesome with ‘im.’
‘You’d better go and pack up your box,’ said the housekeeper, ‘and not stand gossiping there. What do you know of the ways of gentry, married or single, I should like to know? When you’ve been in service as long as I have you may talk.’
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 597
